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Month: March 2009

The court session on the suit filed against Elena Maglevannaya took place on 26 March 2009 at 14.00 in Kirovskiy district court of Volgograd. The suit was filed by the chief of the LIU-15 detention colony administration, A.I. Mansvetov.

The main hearing was postponed as the defendant appealed to present the video and photo footage taken by a special commission at the ombudsman of Volgograd region less than a year ago.

Those witnesses who don’t live in Volgograd were also questioned, including Zubayraev’s lawyer, Musa Khadisov and two Chechen HRDs from the Human Rights Center at office of the Chechen ombusdman, Rosa Shamieva and Madina Astamirova.

The judge didn’t satisfy the appeal to bring Zubayraev to give his testimony in court.

The day before the court session Musa Khadisov had a meeting with Zubayraev. During the court session he gave a detailed description of signs of torture on his body: feet with nail wounds going through, a screw in one of his knees, the wound on the head.

Shamieva and Astamirova stated some of the facts from the previous service of V.D Deripasko, the acting chair of the LIU-15 colony. He served in Chernokozovo detention center in the 2nd war campaign in Chechnya. Dogs were set on people on his orders, according to their testimonies.

Written testimony of Zubayraev was also presented to the court.

The next court session has been scheduled for April 7. Witnesses residing in Volgograd are going to be questioned.

The judge also stated that she is going to bring owners of the websites where Maglevannaya’s articles were published as co-defendants.

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The Open Library is, among other things, a useful repository of older books which have been scanned in their entirety, and can be read online free of charge. The books are mostly in English, but there are over one million of them, and they include almost everything, from long out-of-print editions of the classics through works of history and philosophy to travel studies and political memoirs. I came across this enormous library via a recent post at the German-language Estland blog, which contains links to a number of fascinating books about the early development of the Baltic States. New Masters of the Baltic by Arthur Brown Ruhl (Dutton, 1921) take a detailed look at the situation of Finland, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia in the period immediately following their independence, while The main issues confronting the minorities of Latvia and Eesti (1922) is a consideration of precisely that subject.

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In the Jerusalem Post, Maya Spitzer discusses the continuing rise of anti-Semitic feelings and actions among the Norwegian public, which is causing grave concern to Norway’s small Jewish community. According to Manfred Gerstenfeld, chairman of the Jerusalem Center of Public Affairs,

“the elite, the academics, politicians and media consider themselves to be great moralists, with very little self-introspection. Their self-righteousness, arrogance, and inherited Lutheran prejudices against Jews has led to a huge amount of anti-Israel sentiment. Gaza caused these latent feelings in society to come to the fore.”

Rabbi Yoav Melchior, considered the leading rabbi of Norway, said he had been “very scared during the war.”

“Hatred spread in a fast, dangerous way. This was blind emotionalism against Israel and against Jews. It gets deep at the heart of Norway’s emotional anti-Semitism. The current wave of anti-Semitism shows what people have been holding inside them,” he said.

Update:The Jerusalem Post has now removed Maya Spitzer’s article from its website following a large number of protests, apparently from Norwegian-American readers. The author has stood by her report, and we are still linking to the article via Tundra Tabloids. We’ll continue to watch developments.

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Arnold Meri, who died a couple of days ago, shared his surname with the late President of Estonia, Lennart Meri. They were indeed cousins, but what they did for Estonia could hardly be more different.

Lennart Meri was a somewhat eccentric ethnologist and film-maker, who was educated abroad but spent some involuntary years (1941-46) in Siberia with his parents as a deportee. When he had grown up, Lennart went again and again to Siberia, voluntarily this time, to interview and film Finno-Ugrian peoples. And he finally became the first President of a reborn Estonia in 1991.

His cousin Arnold’s exploits also led to Siberia, but in a much nastier way. Even after his death, Arnold Meri still stands accused of taking part in the notorious 1949 Deportations from Estonia, when a total of some 20,700 people were sent to various (slave) labour camps in Russia.

Arnold Meri joined the Red Army during the first Soviet occupation of Estonia in 1940. He seems to have been a brave soldier and was decorated for fighting against the Germans, whom the Russians had decided were aggressors, once the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact had been broken. Arnold Meri ended his WWII military career with the rank of colonel. So far, so good.

As you can read in another posting here, deportations took place in June of 1940 and again in March 1949, which is the reason they are being commemorated now, some 60 years after the latter events. Arnold Meri’s hand in all this was that he helped plan and carry out the deportations specifically for the western Estonian island of Hiiumaa (Dagö, in German and Swedish). On the 25th March of that year, 251 inhabitants of that island were rounded up, taken to the Soviet base and port of Paldiski the next morning, and then sent by train (cattle wagons) from there to Siberia.

Arnold Meri also belonged to the central command structure for Estonia for the 39 so-called Destruction Battalions (hävituspataljonid) whose job it was to stamp out anti-Soviet resistance by, for instance, killing off all the Forest Brethren, an Estonian guerrilla group. He did, however, himself suffer Stalinist repression in 1951, and was not rehabilitated until 1956.

By 2003, those Estonians that wanted to bring people to trial for such crimes as the deportations saw that time was ticking away. In August 2007, Arnold Meri was charged with genocide, as 43 of the 1949-deportees in his sphere of responsibility, mostly women and children, had died in Novosibirsk. The trial was resumed in May 2008.

At this point, Russia started interfering. In that same month, the Duma clamoured for the “shameful trial” to be stopped. The Duma was worried that bringing Arnold Meri to trial would discredit the activities of the so-called anti-Hitler coalition. (This coalition seems to have been rather inactive during the validity of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact…) And now, a couple of days ago, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev posthumously awarded Arnold Meri the Medal of Honour.

While Arnold Meri may indeed have deserved such an honour for defending Russia during WWII, it is most strange that the subsequent role of this man has been conveniently airbrushed out of his official Russian obituary.

For more details about Arnold Meri, plus several links, read the Wikipedia entry here.

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The JC has a leading article on the U.K. government refusal to pass legislation that would prevent the bringing of private prosecutions for war crimes without government assent, after it promised for several years that it would do so. The paper describes this as “a shocking piece of duplicity, double-dealing and hypocrisy”. In addition, it notes:

Gordon Brown has convened a meeting next week to discuss the implementation of a scheme designed to facilitate the boycott of goods produced on the West Bank – a meeting at which, conveniently and reprehensibly, there will not be a single Israeli or even Jewish community representative present. It does not take a genius to work out what will come next after a government sponsored boycott of Israeli goods and a de facto boycott of Israeli people: a wider boycott of Israel. The government talks a reasonable fame. But it acts like a street thug. These are worrying times for our community.

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Writing in the Finnish newspaper Iltalehti, its editor-in-chief Tuomas Keskinen comments that Russian occupation has meant different things for Finland and Estonia. Sweden’s defeat by Russia in 1809 and the subsequent treaty that transformed Finland into a Grand Duchy turned out to be a relative blessing for the country after 400 years of Swedish rule. On the other hand, Russia’s occupation of Estonia, which Stalin began in the autumn of 1939, was of a wholly different order, and represented an illegal takeover analogous to the land-grabs practiced by the Nazis in Europe earlier in the decade. Keskinen says that the publication of Sofi Oksanen and Imbi Paju’s new book, Kaiken takana oli pelko (Fear was behind everything, WSOY, 2009), will help Finns to understand the horrors that were experienced by the people of their smaller neighbour to the south.